“He talked to me about the autobiography he was writing. But even as he talked, he told four different versions of one childhood incident. Even as he affirmed that he intended to tell the truth, the absolute truth about his life, he told two or three different truths”…..Konrad Bercovici (a friend of Charlie’s).

Chaplin left memoirs and anecdotal reminiscences which provide us with the raw material to make connections between his early life and his art. He left them on two separate occasions, fifty years apart.

In 1915, Charlie was cajoled and encouraged to spin his story by a coy and flattering young reporter (Rose Wilder Lane) who attempted to scribble down verbatim her 26-year-old subject’s non-stop Cockney patter.. Rising to the occasion (or taking the bait), a flamboyant and not-yet-world famous or reputation-conscious Charlie obliged his sympathetic feminine listener by engaging in a one-man rap (Robin Williams-style). With gusto, the boyishly charming actor amused himself and entertained Lane by playfully dramatizing, embroidering and improvising Oliver Twist-like scenes from his London childhood which she then attempted to peddle as his “as-told-to” memoirs--“Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story” (CCOS). It was the re-issuing of Lane’s original newspaper interviews in book form which Chaplin decided to kill for several reasons.

His free-associative monologues had already appeared as a 29-part series of articles in the rotogravure section of a limited-circulation, local San Francisco newspaper with Charlie’s complete cooperation and approval. But he got cold feet about allowing those collected improv sessions to be re-released (verbatim and unedited) as CCOS because of the potentially embarrassing, self-told “lies” they contained coupled with the fact that during the intervening months he had sky-rocketed from a well paid film actor (who modestly described himself as “a little nickel comedian”) to the most well-known and highest-paid personage in the world. His meteoric status change took place in the interval between the original newspaper series and CCOS’s scheduled publication date one year later.

Chaplin’s self-written, late-life memoir “My Autobiography” is equally controversial. The first seven or eight chapters are riveting. But the accuracy and honesty of that book is equally problematic. As a venerable paterfamilias (see the 1964 family Xmas card above), 75-year-old Chaplin purposely omitted or obfuscated many personal details of his early childhood and later private life in order to present himself and his family of origin in the most dignified possible light: “to guage the morals of our family by ordinary standards would be like plunging a thermometer into boiling water.” (For a complete discussion see the Afterwords chapter in Chaplin A Life).But as the two photographs above suggest, the playful young bachelor who narrated his life story in 1915 bore little physical and psychological resemblance to the staid and elderly family man person who penned a very different version of his life story half a century later.